England’s best hope of making a winning start to their World Cup campaign is to expose Italy’s vulnerability to counterattacks, believes Luc Holtz, the manager who guided Luxembourg to a draw against the Azzurri last week.

The side that the Italy manager Cesar Prandelli selected for the friendly in Perugia was similar to the one expected to line up against England in Manaus, but Italy laboured to build a lead against Luxembourg before conceding an 85th-minute equaliser to draw with the team ranked 112th in the world. While counselling against reading too much into pre‑tournament games, Holtz says his team found that Italy are full of menace going forward but can be fragile defensively.

“If Italy have a weakness it is that they can be hurt on counterattacks,” he added. “Under Cesare Prandelli they do not play like the Italy of old: they are much more offensive, they tend to dominate possession and their full-backs can sometimes get caught very high up. We noticed that even before they played against us – they had drawn 0-0 with the Republic of Ireland the week before but the Irish could have scored two or three times on the counter-attack – so we tried to exploit it, too.

“For England, then, it could be all about the quality of the transition from defence to attack. If that is the way that Roy Hodgson chooses to play, he will need players who are fast and clever in the way they run into spaces. From what I’ve seen, Sturridge does that very well. That seems to be how to create the most problems for Italy.”

Italy also looked shaky when defending set-pieces against Luxembourg, and the equaliser came when Maxime Chanot headed in from a corner, but Holtz believes that was testament to his own team’s qualities rather than an inherent Italian frailty. “Any team can score against anyone from set-pieces if they are properly executed,” Holtz added.

While Holtz gives England hope of penetrating the Italian defence, he does not have any magic formula for stifling Andrea Pirlo, who orchestrated Italy’s domination of England at the last European Championship and has the ability to do so again, even at the age of 35.

“It is very difficult to stop him,” says Holtz. “OK, he doesn’t move fast, but he plays fast. We tried to stay close to him and pressurise him as soon as he got the ball but he sees things quicker than other players and plays the ball before you can do anything about it. Things might not have come off for him against us but there’s no doubt that he is still a player who can decide a game in an instant.

“Because Italy have so much of the ball it is essential to be very disciplined against them in defence,” he added. “Luxembourg has made enormous progress in recent years and we were able to do that but they still created chances.”

Holtz also wonders whether the extreme temperature in Manaus will persuade the Italy manager to alter his approach. “Prandelli’s philosophy will be interesting to see,” Holtz said. “This game is being played in a rather special environment so it will be very difficult for any team to play with an aggressive tempo for 90 minutes. Perhaps he will cede more possession and territory to England than he normally does and that would make it more difficult for England to counter-attack. I certainly think this is going to be a very tactical encounter. It will probably be determined by a moment of individual skill or a set-piece.”

Holtz believes that the conditions will make the England-Italy showdown all the more critical because they will be competing for a single ticket to the next round. “I think Uruguay will go through,” he added. “Not because they have more quality than Italy or England, just because they are more used to the climate in South America. But if Italy get out of the group, they can definitely do a lot of damage to other teams.

“They are canny tournament specialists with some very experienced players, they know how to raise their level of play for the big games. I’m not so sure about England, it will depend on what condition they are in – they have a lot of talent and a style that I really like but in past tournaments England have lacked physical and even mental freshness because of their tough domestic season.”